Sea Changes
by Dala1
Summary: A collection of drabbles about the complicated relationships between man and the sea (and okay, one shipxship)
1. Caught by the Sea

Anamaria/Sea

* * *

Her mama tells her not to play down by the water, but Anamaria doesn't listen. Long as Mama can't see her and the master doesn't know, she figures it doesn't matter. She loves the color of the sea, the way it changes with sun and wind and depth. The surf washes over her toes and she feels clean inside.

Her brother Paul drowns when he's out getting an eel for the mistress's supper and that's when Mama screams, holds Anamaria's hair in both hands and cries that now she'll understand how the sea takes the ones you love. Anamaria lets her mother's tears soak her skin, but knows she's wrong. The sea didn't take Paul, it set him free - that's about the only thing she and the stiff-necked white pastor agree on.

And some day soon, she vows, she'll seek her freedom there too. One way or another.

* * *


	2. Challenge

_Dauntless_/_Pearl_

* * *

She wasn't going to stand for this. The impertinent little wench! Flashing sail, plunging through the waves, her men shouting and waving across the distance as if they thought themselves better than a properly painted and turned-out king's vessel. And that captain of hers - oh, the nerve of that cad, saluting the Commodore from the mizzentop before he scrambled off to the wheel.

The Commodore was better than that, she thought proudly. Her captain was a man of little distinction, but today the Commodore sailed aboard. The Commodore was noble and true. The Commodore would not be baited. The Commodore...

...looked up into the _Dauntless's_ billowing sails, shading his eyes against the sun. Shoulders squaring, he strode to the helm, calling out orders, and politely relieved Captain Martin from his post.

She felt the shift, the new freedom as lines were tugged and yards shifted, so surprised that she barely noticed.

The Commodore frowned, stroking his hand along a spoke of her wheel and glancing at the _Pearl_ up ahead. "Slow to respond," he murmured.

His words stung along every inch of her dignified bulk. _Slow_, was she? She'd show them all, the proud Commodore and his insolent rival, and most of all that flirty creation frolicking upon the blue sea.

* * *


	3. Sidhe

Gillette/_Dauntless_

* * *

Night after night, he dreamt of a red-haired woman.

She came upon him in his bed, but it was not really his bed, for everywhere around him he could see green. He was never quite sure if it was the green of moor and meadow or the green of the northern seas. It was definitely the green of her eyes, though.

Her hands were strong and capable on his body, and no matter how he thought to resist, could always coax him into response. He did hold firm when she offered him cold red wine and delicate sweets - his mother's superstitions had taught him better.

When he woke in the morning, a chill washed over him despite the tropical heat; his hands grew clammy and his cheeks pale. The only way to soothe his upset stomach was to open his shutters and look down on the blue bay below, at the ships anchored there. And then he felt right as rain.

He was playing chess with Groves one night when the subject of vessel construction came up, English as opposed to French. Gillette had sailed on French ships as a child, and he used the _Dauntless_ as his primary example of the superiority of English shipbuilding.

Groves gave him a quizzical look. "But the _Dauntless_ isn't English."

"Of course she is," Gillette retorted. "She was new when Captain Norrington came down here."

Tilting his chair back on two legs in a way he knew Gillette hated, Groves shook his head. "She was, but she comes from an Irish shipyard. It was a whole Irish village built that ship ten years ago."

He supposed he must have blanched, because Groves let the chair fall and looked at him with concern. "Andrew? Are you all right?"

* * *

"I am fine," said Gillette, and he proceeded to lose three games in a row. 


	4. Lifetime in Moments

Jack/_Pearl_

* * *

The sun was sinking low in the sky when they sailed away the first time. Jack stood on the beach, heedless of the tide rising around his ankles, his feet sinking into the sand, the last of the day's heat beating down on his unprotected head. And he watched as his ship shrank to a speck on the horizon and finally disappeared.

It was deep night the next time he saw her, moon high and full above the fort's battlements. Peering out the prison window, he could make out the sea from the sky by its sparkle, and he could only see the _Pearl_ by virtue of the fact that she did not. With every dull thud from her gun deck, his chest grew tight and his throat dry, and he thought, _Now._

The second time she left him, it was bright afternoon and the island shimmered in the sun, gold and green and blue, prettier than any jewel, prettier even than his companion. Jack cared not. The sand burned, the waves taunted, the girl shouted. He checked the shot in his pistol and sought the numbing veil of the rum buried in the hated earth.

When he stood at her helm for the first time in ten years, he let his clothes dry on his back. He didn't move for the next eighteen hours. Only when he was directing the ship off course by sagging against the wheel was Gibbs able to persuade him to collapse in a hammock. In his dreams she sang to him, a song like stretched canvas and creaking wood and the deep, lonely cry of whales.

He watched her go down from the deck of an English man-of-war. The captain ordered the other prisoners below, but he gripped Jack's hair and made him look. He wouldn't have turned his head even if he could. He owed her that much. As she burned and broke apart, he could hear her screaming defiance, until her last bones fell beneath the waves.

_The commodore will be pleased,_ the captain growled into his ear. Jack didn't bother to contradict him. Within an hour of his arrival in Kingston, Norrington came to see him, his green eyes shadowed like a spot of dark, dangerous current. He asked if there was anything, anything Jack could tell him, anything that might be of use.

_Yes,_ said Jack. _I was faithful. But it didn't save her and it won't save me._

It hadn't, and after the briefest of trials, it didn't.

But Jack could see the ocean from the gallows, and so he smiled, because no one could take that from them. And now no one would get the chance to try.

* * *


End file.
